Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 93

Repeat the Previous Substitute Command

At times, we might have to amend the range of a substitute command. We might have made a mistake on our first try, or maybe we just want to rerun the command exactly but on a different buffer. A couple of shortcuts make it easy to repeat the substitute command.

Repeat a Line-Wise Substitution Across the Entire File

Suppose that we’ve just executed this command, which acts upon the current line:

:s/target/replacement/g

We realize our mistake at once: we should have prepended %. No harm done. We can repeat the command across the entire file just by pressing g& (see g&ⓘ), which is equivalent to running the following:

:%s//~/&

This longhand command spells out the following instruction: ...